Not a functioning village. Ruins. The structural remnants of mud and timber buildings that had been abandoned for decades — the mud walls dissolved by decades of monsoons into barely-visible earthworks, the timber long since rotted, the thatched roofs gone without trace. The neem tree was there — very large, very old, as large as a tree that had been growing for over a hundred years would be. The peepal tree at the settlement's centre was there, enormous, its roots wide and deep, its canopy spread across what had clearly once been the settlement's main gathering area. The well — stone-lined, filled in, the opening visible as a depression in the ground. The grain-sorting stone — flat, large, now half-buried in earth that had built up around it over decades.
The field officer had photographed everything. Her photographs registered all of it — the ruins, the trees, the overgrown paths, the filled-in well. The photographs were clear and detailed and showed a site that had been abandoned for many decades.
They found no people.
They found one other thing. The historical documentation consultant, who was trained to look for material evidence at sites of historical significance, had found — under the roots of the peepal tree, in the ground that the roots had grown around and through over seventy-seven years — the remains. Not intact. Not identifiable individually. But the archaeological evidence, examined by the consultant and later confirmed by a physical anthropologist who was sent separately, indicated that a significant number of people had been buried at the site of the settlement in the period consistent with 1947.
The consultant's report noted that the burial site was consistent with a mass casualty event, handled by whoever had been left to handle it. The burials had been done with care — the orientation was consistent with local funerary practice, and the physical evidence suggested the bodies had been arranged by people who were grieving, not simply disposing. Someone had buried them properly. And then — the consultant's report suggested this carefully, noting that it was interpretation rather than established fact — the burials had been maintained. The site showed evidence of ongoing tending, of clearing and arrangement, that was inconsistent with complete abandonment. Something had been caring for the site, consistently, for a very long time.
